My colleague Anuj Desai drew my attention to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It describes some of the initiatives of universities that recently received grants from the Kauffman Foundation to take entrepreneurship out of the business school. (We were in the running for one of the grants, though we were ultimately not selected.) The most interesting part of the article to me was the description of dissenters to the program.

For example, Stewart A. Weaver, a professor of history at the University of Rochester, had this to say:

However broadly one attempts to define it, the term 'entrepreneurship' has unavoidably commercial implications that are unsuited to an undergraduate college of arts and sciences. The focus on entrepreneurship detracts from teaching about lasting values like wisdom and humanity that don't have any commercial value.

While the principal goal of the Kauffman program is to expand the notion of entrepreneurship beyond the commercial realm, I am a skeptic of so-called social entrepreneurship programs. The source of my skepticism is simply that I am not sure that "social entrepreneurship" has any distinctive content. Frankly, nothing I have heard from people who talk about social entrepreneurship has convinced me that "social entrepreneurship" is anything other than "entrepreneurship."

And this seems to be at the heart of Professor Weaver's objections. Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about successful competition, how to get ahead. The tension between capitalism and community has been discussed on this blog before, and I cannot claim that Professor Weaver is completely off track. On the other hand, I do claim that he misses an important purpose of entrepreneurships studies:

To make his point, Mr. Weaver and his wife, Celia S. Applegate, an associate professor of history, approached the university's curriculum committee with a spoof proposal for a course: "Great Entrepreneurs of the 20th Century: Gandhi and Hitler." Rather than take a traditional historical look at the two men, the two professors said, "we will take a commercial approach that recognizes the shared entrepreneurial talents that each might well have admired in the other." In Hitler's case, that talent might be "how an ambitious but not-very-talented painter took the idea of racial supremacy and turned it into a workable method of plunder, murder, and genocide." The point, Mr. Weaver says, was to show the "moral slippage that can ensue when you start applying market metaphors indiscriminately to history."

Obviously, the purpose of studying entrepreneurship is not to "apply market metaphors indiscriminately to history," but to better understand the role of entrepreneurs in society. My problem with Professor Weaver and others who share his position, is not that they are wrong about the commercial nature of entrepreneurship, but that they somehow have come to believe that the study of commerce is inherently inferior to the study of other facets of human behavior and interaction. Courses in entrepreneurship are not necessarily courses in "how to start and run a successful business." (Strange that Weaver doesn't see this, given his interest in industrial history.)

Weaver's objections appear to be a form of intellectual parochialism aimed at preserving his particular view of "higher education." The root problem with his educational program is that -- contrary to his elevated claims about wisdom and humanity -- it produces students who are incapable of understanding the world in which they live. In Professor Weaver's ideal university, vast tracts of human interaction are off limits, and that is shameful.

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